This invention relates to equipment for facilitating the removal of reeled wire from wire-carrying spools.
In the past a number of unreeling devices have been proposed and produced, one such device being disclosed in applicant's U.S. Pat. No. 3,425,647 issued Feb. 4, 1969, showing a rotatable disk or wheel carried at one end of a wire-carrying spool, together with a brush consisting of multiple, radially extending flexible tines adjacent peripheral portions of the wheel. In the above construction, the brush is held stationary with respect to the spool, while the wheel is freely rotatable under the action of the unreeling wire.
Under such circumstances, as wire is removed from the reel it brushes by the periphery of the freely rotatable wheel and past the radially extending tines of the tension brush. Due to the frictional engagement between the wire and the flange of the wheel, the latter gradually increases its rate of rotation as the wire take-off speed is increased.
It has been found that under certain conditions, the speed of the wheel increases to a point in excess of that desired to provide uniform dereeling of wire. In addition, in cases where the wire speed is abruptly halted the inertia of the rotating wheel is often sufficient to keep it rotating for a short interval of time beyond such halting. This momentary rotation tends to unravel several additional turns of wire from the reel, thus resulting in an undesirable looseness of the strands.
Still other arrangements involved the use of a stationary tension brush together with a positively driven wheel wherein the speed of the wheel could be changed to suit different conditions of wire size and wire take-off speed. While such arrangements provided a satisfactory solution to the problem of controlling the speed of the wheel, they tended to be relatively expensive and cumbersome, involving electric motors and control circuits therefor in order to provide the necessary adjustability in rotary speed. In addition, such prior devices were not capable of quick assembly to the spool. Thus, their flexibility was often rather limited.